We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (review)

54Quaker History It would be insensitive not to issue a caveat. These writings are all from mystical , Christ-centered, unprogrammed meeting Friends. It is therefore not representative of contemporary Quaker thought. Steere admits as much, and does so without apology. What we have in Quaker Spirituality is "classic Quakerism," the original vision. In closing, I offer in turn brief insights from the Friends included in Quaker Spirituality. Steere: "The mysterious thing of it all is that in God's eyes there are no 'little' things. Everything matters and everything leads to something else." Fox: "Be swift to hear, and slow to speak, and let it be in the grace, which seasons all words." Penington: "There is life . . . peace . . . joy . . . righteousness . . . health . . . salvation . . . power of redemption in the Seed. " Woolman: "I must in all things attend to his wisdom and be teachable." Stephen: "The divine guidance is away from self-indulgence, often away from outward success." Jones: "The vital question, after all, is whether this small religious Society here in the world today is a living organ of the Spirit or not?" Kelly: "We have plenty of Quakers to follow God the first half of the way. " In Quaker Spirituality Steere has made a noble attempt to follow all the way. Oakwood SchoolDwight Spann-Wilson We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Dorothy Sterling. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984. 535 pp. $22.50. Demonstrating a command of sources that comes only with a lifetime of study, Dorothy Sterling has brought together an amazingly rich collection of documents from a surprisingly wide variety of repositories illustrating the lives of black American women in the nineteenth century. Her book is a remarkable achievement in editing, combining almost 500 pages of text with a four page, single-spaced, bibliography of printed works, citations from 23 periodicals and manuscript collections from 44 repositories. Yet Sterling is concerned with depth as well as breadth, with the personally significant as well as the politically important; her work portrays the collective experience of black women through the poignancy of individual lives. Drawing on the slave narratives collected as part of the works of the Works Progress Administration and other oral history projects of the 1920s and 1930s, many of which have been recently reprinted and anthologized, from accounts by white observers and from letters written by or for slave women, Sterling examines the lives of black women in the South before and during the Civil War. She includes materials on the expected topics, childhood, work, family, and on such unexpected but significant subjects as seduction, rape, concubinage, resistance and resettlement. Sterling tells the story of free black women in the antebellum period, drawing on records of female civic and literary societies, indentures, wills, letters and Freedom's Journal and other newspapers. Black women in the North also suffered from discrimination, but some became caterers, wigmakers, dressmakers, wives of wealthy merchants, "schoolmarms," and outstanding leaders in the abolition movement. Black women in the North and South took on new roles during Reconstruction. Using the registers of the Freedman's Bureau, Sterling shows how some women became sharecroppers, braving the violence of the Ku Klux Klan. From newspapers and contemporary accounts she shows how others became "Washerwomen, Maumas, Exodusters and Jubileers." A few attended Fisk, Oberlin, Tuskegee and medical schools to become "Representative Women" of "a new generation." In a Book Reviews55 concluding epilogue Sterling provides vignettes of four black women at the turn of the century based on extensive quotation from their private journals. We Are Your Sisters is indeed a remarkable achievement, but it is, as Sterling herself says, "not a definitive history ... but a sourcebook, a sampler. " Sterling 's principal purpose is to gather and present these precious but little used materials. Yet if her collection is to stand as a source book, the individual entries should have been more clearly identified; imprecise citations and unconventional footnoting will make the work of future historians more difficult. Moreover, Sterling 's organizational framework and assumptions about the nature of abolitionism and feminism tend to obscure the totality and complexity of the black female experience. She presents this experience through a prism...